17 December 2013

Of
the seven deadly sins, envy may not be the wickedest, but it is the
most embarrassing. To be possessed by envy is to admit a humiliating
personal inadequacy: We do not envy others those attainments that we
think we too might achieve, but those we despair of ever possessing.
Wrath, greed, pride, lust — all assume a certain self-possession. Sloth
and gluttony are practically standard issue in times of plenty such as
these. Wrath and pride are the sins of great (but not good) men. Envy is
the affliction of the insignificant. It is the small man’s sin.

Which brings us to Robert Reich, who, having practically made a cult of envy, has taken to abusing the well-off for their acts of charity. Professor Reich, a ward of the taxpayers of
California (at $246,199.84 per annum) and a federal ward before that, is
persistently unhappy about how other people use their money, and he
scoffs that America’s rich philanthropists are phony and self-serving,
investing too much in opera and ballet and fancy colleges, and too
little in feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. He particularly
resents the fact that our tax code encourages such giving, with
deductions that reduced federal revenue by some $39 billion last year —
federal revenue that could have gone toward employing men such as Robert
Reich.

This calls to mind Edmund Spenser’s description of Envy
personified: “He hated all good works and virtuous deeds / And him no
less, that any like did use / And who with gracious bread the hungry
feeds / His alms for want of faith he doth accuse.”

Professor
Reich being Professor Reich, you can guess how his argument unfolds. (If
you have read one Robert Reich column, which is one too many, you have
read them all.) He writes: “As the tax year draws to a close, the
charitable tax deduction beckons. America’s wealthy are its largest
beneficiaries. According to the Congressional Budget Office,
$33 billion of last year’s $39 billion in total charitable deductions
went to the richest 20 percent of Americans, of whom the richest 1
percent reaped the lion’s share.” It goes without saying that he makes
no attempt to compare the apportionment of charitable tax deductions
with charitable donations — that would only complicate things and invite
an unpleasant encounter with reality.

For a sense of perspective, consider that that $39 billion in tax deductions was associated with$316 billion in charitable donations.
Our innumerate class warriors dismiss philanthropy as a complicated tax
dodge for the rich, but in fact tax deductions amount to about 12
percent of total charitable donations, meaning that our wily robber
barons have figured out a way of beating the taxman by . . . giving away
far more money than they receive in related tax benefits. Even if
Professor Reich got his way on tax rates and they went up to 90 percent
at the top, you still don’t come out ahead by giving away money.

Beyond
stealing altar offerings from the almighty god of revenue, our
philanthropists offend Professor Reich’s sensibilities in another way:
They don’t give to the sort of enterprises he wants them to give to. “A
large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s
wealthy are for donations to culture palaces — operas, art museums,
symphonies, and theaters — where they spend their leisure time
hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors. . . . These aren’t really
charities as most people understand the term. They’re often investments
in the life-styles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to
have as well. Increasingly, being rich in America means not having to
come across anyone who’s not.” Unsurprisingly, Progressive America’s
favorite non-economist-who-plays-an-economist-on-TV does not bother to
document what he means by “a large share.”

Giving to art-and-culture
organizations amounted to just over $14 billion in 2012,
or about 4.5 percent of charitable contributions, far less than was
given to health, human-services, or public-benefit organizations. There
are a fair number of single organizations that run into the billions per
year, including YMCA ($6.24 billion), Goodwill Industries ($5 billion),
Catholic Charities ($4.4 billion), and the Red Cross ($3.12 billion).

Professor
Reich is writing in a very old tradition, one that is especially
familiar to Catholics: Why spend money on beauty when there is
necessity? Protestants have a long and rich tradition of abusing the
Catholic Church for its supposed wealth — why not auction off the
Sistine Chapel and give the money to the poor? The egalitarian liberal’s
equivalent: Why incentivize donations to Princeton when we could be
spending that money on food stamps? I like to imagine Robert Reich at
the Nativity: “Gold? Frankincense? Myrrh? Try something useful!”

Why should we, things being as awful as they are, encourage such frivolities as take place at Lincoln Center?

A
question, though: If spending on art, music, and culture is
self-serving when private citizens do it, what is it when government
does it? Essential, necessary, crucial — of course. The New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs by itself spends some $150 million a year
on precisely that sort of thing. The state spends dozens of millions
more. A good deal of that money goes to subsidizing theater, including
big-ticket theater. In my role as a theater critic, I am constantly
surprised by how many shows selling tickets for north of $100 are
publicly subsidized. It isn’t huge money — without public support for
the Manhattan Theater Club, that $120 ticket to see Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place
(excellent, be sorry if you missed it) might have been $125 instead.
But it adds up: a few dozen millions from the state, a hundred million
from the city, a billion and a half from Washington.

Try cutting a piece of that and you’ll hear howls about how vital
every farthing spent in the service of culture is. Unless you’re David
Koch, in which case it’s “Thanks for giving the New York ballet a nice
place to perform, now please die.” I wonder how many New York
balletomanes know that the David Koch in the David Koch Theater is that
David Koch. Perhaps it is the urge to put one’s name on things that so
offends Professor Reich and his colleagues at the Richard and Rhoda
Goldman School of Public Policy.

Or he might contend that government spending on arts and culture does go to important causes, such as bringing us interviews with Robert Reich on NPR and subsidizing screenings of hisdopey documentary film.

At
its root, this is not about tax revenue or the woeful state of the
federal cash-flow statement. This is about envy and its cousin,
covetousness. Progressives know that they will always enjoy
disproportionate influence in the public sector, but they are vexed that
there exist large streams of money that are, for the moment, utterly
outside their control. They convince others — and themselves, probably —
that they are driven by compassion, but they are in fact driven by
envy: Note Barack Obama’s insistence that tax rates on the wealthy
should be raised even if doing so produced no fiscal benefit — it’s just
“the right thing to do,” he said, necessary “for purposes of fairness.”
The battle hymn of “Nobody needs that much money!” has a silent harmony
line: “And I get to decide how much is enough!”

Prayerful people
bargaining with God over lottery numbers no doubt imagine that they
would do some worthy things with that money, on top of buying a Ferrari.
Progressives imagine all the wonderful things they could do with other
people’s money, and no doubt some of them are well-intentioned. But envy
poisons whatever good intentions they have, which is how men such as
Professor Reich come to write resentful indictments of people who are,
remember, giving away billions of dollars of their own money. He’d
prefer their money be given away by him, or by bureaucracies under the
tutelage of men such as himself. As the moral philosopher Hannibal
Lecter put it: “He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to
covet? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we
see every day.”

Megan McArdle once observed that in our public
discourse, “very rich” is defined as “just above the level a top-notch
journalist in a two-earner couple could be expected to pull down.” There
is no envy like the envy of a $250,000 man in a world of $250 million
men, as Robert Duvall’s crusty newspaper editor explains to a
financially frustrated employee in The Paper: “The people we
cover — we move in their world, but it is their world. We don’t get the
money — never have, never will.” But being in that world, they learn to
covet, which helps explain why Professor Reich’s old boss, Bill Clinton,
ended up with $50-odd million in the bank after a lifetime of public
service.

Americans gave away $316 billion in 2012, and will give
away as much or more this year, and Professor Reich composed 731 words
to explain the problems related to that. He should have composed two
words, especially relevant to this season:

10 December 2013

The
Office of the Presidency has become increasingly imperial and
autocratic. Barack Obama has just taken it to such an extreme level of
lawlessness that it bodes dire consequences for the nation. It's not
just him. Bush took many actions unilaterally. Obama has taken Bush's
expansion of executive power and put it on steroids.

Regardless
of how one feels about either Bush or Obama, the imperial presidency is
anti-American and anti-constitutional. Some may not be concerned
about what their guy does because the ends justify the means, but they
should imagine the future. Their 'guy' will not always be in office
and, in modern times, Presidents have a way of building on the excesses
of their predecessors. If Obama is allowed to continue, what will the
next President of the United States do? Or the one after that?

Just
consider this: Obama has, unilaterally and illegally, issued waivers
and carve-outs to his clientele. What if a future President decides to
issue an Executive Order directing the Internal Revenue Service not to
collect taxes from his cronies on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley?
What if a future President instructs the EPA to enforce laws against one
industry, but not another? What if a future President - say the first
Hispanic President of the United States - directs the Department of
Justice to only enforce civil rights laws when they favour Latinos?
What if the first Muslim President decides to make it a requirement that
companies with governmental contracts refrain from charging interest on
the accounts of other customers? What if the first woman President
directs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to give interest-free mortgages to
women only regardless of means?

In
America, all citizens are supposed to be treated equally under the law
and the government is supposed to obey the laws that it imposes on
everyone else. Without the rule of law and equal protection under the
law, we will become just another corrupt, lawlessness, and bankrupt
Banana Republic.

Despite what Richard Nixon said, if it is illegal, when the President does it, it is still unlawful. Being President (or holding any office) does not put one above the law. And, ALL citizens should demand that their elected officials obey the laws and eschew corruption and cronyism. After all, if our leaders don't have to obey the law, why should we?

At least, that's what Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris Perry, Touré, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and the rest of the Theater of the Absurd a/k/a MSNBC - along with President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, the entire Progressive Caucus, and all Progressives - would say if it was the position of any other supporter, especially a white one, of truing the vote.

In 2008, the Supreme Court in Crawford v Marion County Election Board,
553 U.S. 181, held that an Indiana law requiring voters to provide
photo IDs did not violate the Constitution of the United States by a
vote of 6-3. The majority opinion was written by uber-liberal, John Paul
Stevens.

He wrote:

The relevant burdens here are those imposed on eligible
voters who lack photo identification cards that comply with SEA 483.
Because Indiana’s cards are free, the inconvenience of going to the
Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required documents, and posing for a
photograph TO VOTE, OR REPRESENT A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE OVER THE USUAL BURDENS OF VOTING.

The severity of the somewhat heavier burden that may be placed on a
limited number of persons—e.g., elderly persons born out-of-state, who
may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate—IS MITIGATED BY THE FACT THAT ELIGIBLE VOTERS WITHOUT PHOTO IDENTIFICATION MAY CAST PROVISIONAL BALLOTS that will be counted if they execute the required affidavit at the circuit court clerk’s office.

Even assuming that the burden may not be justified as to a
few voters, that conclusion is by no means sufficient to establish
petitioners’ right to the relief they seek.

Some Polls:

* Almost three-quarters of all Americans support the idea that people should have to show photo identification to vote,
even though they are nearly as concerned about voter suppression as
they are about fraud in presidential elections, according to a new
Washington Post poll.

* to show photo identification, such as a driver’s licence, before being allowed to vote.’

* While 44% of Americans perceive partisan politics at play in the support of such laws, far more, 57%, see a genuine interest in fair elections as a big motivator, per WaPo poll.

* 83% of those polled believe laws requiring voters to ‘show identification in order to vote’ is a ‘good thing, per McClatchy.’ (Only 13% see it as a ‘bad thing.’)

* 72% of Democrats see voter ID as a ‘good thing.’

* 65% of those who see themselves as ‘very liberal’ favour voter ID laws.

* 71% percent of Latinos say they support photo ID laws for voters, just 6 percentage points less than the general population’s 77 percent saying this, the poll found.

* Two-thirds of Republicans see voter fraud as a bigger problem;
nearly as many Democrats are primarily concerned with denying eligible
voters access to the ballot box. per WaPo poll.

Pope Francis' first apostolic exhortation, "Evangelii Gaudium"
("The Joy of the Gospel"), is a beautiful document and a joy to
read. I'll leave its theological implications to those who live in
the Roman Catholic Church. What's got many people praising the pope
today, though, is not his plea for good works but rather his
critique of capitalism.You could always detect a pinch of socialistic seasoning in the
church's theological stew. But in this case, the pope doesn't
simply point out that the wealthy aren't doing enough to help
alleviate poverty. He uses the recognizable rhetoric of the
political left to accuse free market systems of generating and
nurturing that poverty.

The pope condemns the "new tyranny" of "idolatry of money,"
reasonably arguing that economic systems should not be accepted
with blind faith but also saying that "as long as the problems of
the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute
autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the
structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the
world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems."

For starters, it's troubling that the pope fails to make any
genuine distinction between Western poverty (terrible) and the
poverty of the Third World (unimaginably terrible). But is it
really true that "absolute autonomy of markets and financial
speculation" are the driving reasons for poverty and inequality?
People in places such as Congo, Burundi and Mozambique live under
corrupt authoritarian regimes where crippling poverty has a
thousand fathers — none of them named capitalism. The people
of Togo do not suffer in destitution because of some derivative
scheme on Wall Street or the fallout from a tech IPO.

"While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially,"
the pope goes on to say, "so too is the gap separating the majority
from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few."

In truth, global inequality has been dropping for years. The
World Bank estimates that global poverty was halved from 1990 to
2010. In fact, according to the World Bank, the United Nations'
"millennium development goal" of cutting world poverty in half by
2015 came in five years ahead of schedule, despite a major global
recession. The decline in poverty coincides, not coincidentally,
with developing nations embracing more market-based systems.

Moreover, the pope falls into the trap of conflating inequality
and poverty. Some countries enjoy income parity because most
citizens are rich, and others do so because most citizens are poor.
Put it this way: Egypt, Pakistan and Mongolia all enjoy more
economic equality than the United States. The gross domestic
product per capita here is $49,800. In Argentina, the pope's
homeland, a place where wealth is more fairly distributed, it's
$18,200.

Now, no reasonable person believes that any economic system is a
cure-all. But how many reasonable people argue that market-based
economies — and the underlying morality that drives them
— haven't done more to alleviate poverty worldwide than any
other system? For the most part, in fact, the more unfettered a
nation's economic system is the more prosperous the population
becomes and, consequently, the more it spends on charity and safety
net programs. When we match up The Heritage Foundation's Index of
Economic Freedom with the World Bank's measure of per capita
income, we find that the countries with the most unencumbered
systems and the most financial "speculation" usually have the least
amount of poverty.

Rather than credit those who do their best to balance this
imperfect system that lifts millions out of impoverishment, the
pope attacks them for the prevalence of imaginary economic
Darwinists who callously keep equality from blooming.
"Consequently," these people "reject the right of states, charged
with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of
control," Pope Francis contends.

Any form of control? Really? The Federal Register in this
country regularly comes in at more than 60,000 pages. Or, to put it
another way, it's longer than all 46 books of the Old Testament,
the 27 books of the New Testament and every gospel the Council of
Nicaea decided to toss, combined. And the United States, a place
teeming with these economic Darwinists, also happens to be one of
the most charitable places on the planet — even before we
begin counting per capita spending on safety nets.

The Pope's Bad Grasp of Basic

Where are his priorities?

By Judge Andrew Napolitano

What is the worst problem in the world today? Might it be war,
starvation, genocide, sectarian violence, murder, slaughter of
babies in the womb? Any of these would be a rational answer. But
when Pope Francis was asked this question recently, he replied,
"Youth unemployment."

To be sure, youth unemployment is a serious problem. In some
parts of the United States, the richest country in the world, it
has reached 25 percent. These are people who are no longer in
school full time and are not yet 30 years of age. It is a problem
for them and their families, for their communities, and for the
welfare states that are supporting them. But is it the worst
problem in the world? Is it a problem for the Roman Catholic
Church? And is it something the Pope is competent to comment upon
or to resolve?

The Pope's youth unemployment comments recently were removed
from the Vatican's website. No sooner had that been done than the
Holy Father issued his first encyclical: a formal papal teaching,
as opposed to his now famous impromptu back-of-the-plane yet
on-the-record comments.

His encyclical is about economics, and it reveals a disturbing
ignorance. I say this with deference and respect. I also say this
as a traditionalist Roman Catholic who laments the post-Vatican II
watering down of sacred traditions, lessening of moral teaching and
trivialization of liturgical practices. But I also say this as a
firm believer that Pope Francis is the Vicar of Christ on Earth
and, as such, personifies the teaching authority of the Church. He
is morally and juridically capable of speaking ex cathedra -- that
is, infallibly -- but only after surveying and distilling
traditional Church teachings and only on matters affecting faith
and morals.

Thank God, so to speak, that his teaching authority is limited
to faith and morals, because in matters of economics, he is wide of
the mark.

His encyclical, entitled "Joy of the Gospel," attacks free
market capitalism because it takes too long for the poor to get
rich. "They are still waiting," the Pope wrote. Well, without
capitalism, which rewards hard work and sacrifice, they will wait
forever. No economic system in history has alleviated more poverty,
generated more opportunity and had more formerly poor people become
rich than capitalism. And the essence of capitalism goes to the
core of Catholic teaching: the personal freedom of every person.
Capitalism is freedom to risk, freedom to work, freedom to save,
freedom to retain the fruits of one's labors, freedom to own
property and freedom to give to charity.

The problem with modern capitalism—a problem that escaped the
scrutiny of His Holiness—is not too much freedom, but too little.
The regulation of free markets by governments, the control of the
private means of production by government bureaucrats, and the
unholy alliances between governments, banks and industry have
raised production costs, stifled competition, established barriers
to entry into markets, raised taxes, devalued savings and priced
many poor out of the labor force. The Pope would do well to pray
for those who have used government to steal freedom so as to
satisfy their lust for power, and for those who have bowed to
government so as to become rich from governmental benefits and not
by the fruits of their own labors.

Traditional Catholic social teaching imposes on all of us a
moral obligation to become our brothers' keepers. But this is a
personal moral obligation, enforced by conscience and Church
teaching and the fires of Hell—not by the coercive powers of the
government. Charity comes from the heart. It consists of freely
giving away one's wealth. It is impossible to be charitable with
someone else's money. That's theft, not charity.

If you give until it hurts, freely and out of love, and seek
nothing temporal in return, you have built up treasure in Heaven.
But if the government takes from you and redistributes your wealth
to those whom the government has decided to benefit—rich and poor
alike—what merit is there in that for you? If you give a poor
person a fish to eat, in a day, he'll be hungry. If you show him
how to catch fish and teach him how to acquire the tools needed to
do so, he can become self-sufficient and perhaps one day rich
enough to help others. If the government takes money from you to
buy the person a fish, half of the money will be wasted.

The Pope seems to prefer common ownership of the means of
production, which is Marxist, or private ownership and government
control, which is fascist, or government ownership and government
control, which is socialist. All of those failed systems lead to
ashes, not wealth. Pope Francis must know this. He must also know
that when Europe was in turmoil in 1931, his predecessor Pius XI
wrote in one of his encyclicals: "(N)o one can be at the same time
a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist."

The Church does not teach just for today, but for the life of
man on Earth. That's why the essence of the Papacy is not
contemporary problem solving, but preservation of truth and
continuity of tradition. For this reason, Popes do not lightly
contradict their predecessors. If it was sacred then, it is sacred
now.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, recently
discovered serious structural problems with St. Patrick's Cathedral
that will cost $200 million to repair. He will soon have that bill
paid. Where did that money come from? It came from the disposable
income of rich Catholic capitalists. Who will benefit from this?
The blue-collar workers whom the restoration project is employing
now have jobs, and everyone—rich and poor—who attends Mass at the
refurbished St. Patrick's will do so in comfort and beauty.

What shall we do about the Pope and economics? We should pray
for his faith and understanding and for a return to orthodoxy. That
means Holy Mother Church under the Vicar of Christ—saving souls,
not pocketbooks.

The Pope's Self-Defeating Anti-Capitalistic Rant

He shouldn't bite the hand that feeds the Church

By Shikha Dalmia

Pope Francis doesn’t have to thank capitalism, a system that has
done far more to alleviate poverty, his pet crusade, than the
institution he leads. But he should at least stop demonizing it—not
least because it enables the very activity that he cherishes most:
charity.

For about the 6th time since assuming office eight
months ago, the Pope last week offered a sweeping condemnation of
“unfettered” capitalism, blaming its alleged obsession with the
“golden calf” for perpetuating poverty, oppression, tyranny and
much else.

The Pope claims that the “opinion” that “economic growth,
encouraged by the free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing
about greater justice and inclusiveness” has “never been confirmed
by the facts.” (He obviously hasn’t been listening to Bono, which isn't entirely a bad thing.)

Therefore, governments “charged with the vigilance of the common
good” must take strong steps to “exercise any form of control,”
including redistributive taxes, to stop the march toward a society
where “those excluded are no longer its underside or its fringes or
its disenfranchised—they are no longer even part of it.

No doubt such purple prose about “exclusion” will gain him
adoring fans among the left—notwithstanding the irony that he is
speaking for an institution that excludes half of
humanity—women—from the ranks of priesthood. But is capitalism the
cause of poverty and is redistribution the cure?

No and Nyet.

Poverty is the default condition of humanity. It is the given.
What needs explaining is wealth. And the greatest engine of wealth
creation is the market. By raising productivity and lowering the
price of goods, markets certainly help the rich, but they help the
poor more. Capitalism’s most impressive achievement, Joseph
Schumpeter noted, was not providing more silk stockings for the
Queen, “but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.”

Indeed, far from promoting Social Darwinism that thrives on “the
survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the
powerless,” as the Pope claimed, capitalism does the opposite: It
fosters economic competition among producers so that consumers
don't have to compete for scarce goods. In 1900, it took an average
worker in the West about an hour to earn a half a gallon of milk.
In 1930, half an hour. And today? Scarcely a few minutes.

If all the profits of the rich in America were handed over to
workers,notes
economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, the workers would only be 30
percent better off. “But in the last two centuries we’re 3,000
percent better off.”

But capitalism hasn’t only produced gains in the West. Between
1990 and 2010, the number of people in extreme poverty as a share
of the total population in developing countries has been cut in
half from 43 percent to 21 percent—a reduction of one billion
people. Why? Because China and India jettisoned Big Government
Socialism, the very thing the Pope advocates, and liberalized their
economies.

It is no exaggeration to say that charity is a balm for poverty
but capitalism is the cure—or in Bono’s evocative mixed metaphorcapitalism’s “job creators and
innovators are the key, and aid is just a bridge."

Indeed, without capitalism, even this balm would be in short
supply or this bridge too short.

Capitalism puts more discretionary income in the pockets of
people to devote to charitable pursuits. It is hardly a
co-incidence that America donates over $300 billion annually toward
charitable causes at home and abroad, the highest of any country on
a per capita basis.

The church itself is a big beneficiary of this capitalist
largesse with its U.S. wing alone contributing 60 percent to its
overall global wealth. Some of this money comes from donations, but
a big chunk comes, actually, from directly partaking in capitalism:
The church is reportedly the largest landowner in Manhattan, the
financial center of the global capitalism system, whose income puts
undisclosed sums into its coffers.

So the new Pope needs to be careful not to bite the hand that
feeds his institution and its work. Otherwise, neither he nor the
poor in whose name he is speaking will have much to be thankful
for.